Iraqis will go to the polls this week, and the upper echelon surrounding the fast-diminishing Secretary-General Annan is at best disinterested in helping. At worst, it is willing to sell out Iraqis, hoping to injure the American-led coalition and the hated Bush administration in the process.

Either way, Turtle Bay’s absence from the transformation of Iraq will be even more pronounced than in past elections. In a typical mix of sloppiness and malice, the one official who made the United Nations even a marginal player in Iraq, Carina Perelli, was fired last week.

“I’m a casualty of the Iraq wars,” the Uruguayan firecracker Ms. Perelli told me on Friday. She talked admiringly about Iraqis braving assassins on their way to the polls. Then she sneered at “petty palace politics” at Turtle Bay.

“They either think preparations are too far gone so it will have no impact,” Ms. Perelli said of her firing by Mr. Annan on the eve of the election, “or they do want it to have an impact.”

I have not always applauded Ms. Perelli’s approach to electoral processes, but it is hard to ignore the way she took an all but dormant operation inside the United Nations’s political department – the electoral assistance unit – and turned it into a world powerhouse.

Ms. Perelli’s leadership on the East Timor election led to Mr. Annan’s only significant success in nine years. Among all U.N. officials, she was the only one praised for Iraq efforts by President Bush in last year’s State of the Union address.

This did not help her at Turtle Bay, where Bush-hatred is even more intense than in other parts of Manhattan. Ms. Perelli is proud of her independence, but even after she unjustifiably admonished Marines for distributing leaflets promoting Iraqi elections, some insisted she was an American “stooge.”

Nevertheless, when she returned to Baghdad in October, leading an international team overseeing a referendum on Iraq’s constitution, Mr. Annan’s chief of staff, Mark Malloch Brown, told staffers he could not fire Ms. Perelli. She was “indispensable” for Turtle Bay’s efforts in Iraq, he explained.

It is difficult for an outsider to discern which of the charges against her are based on fact and which are based on innuendo. It seems the clamor against Ms. Perelli began when she promoted a young staffer too quickly, much to the chagrin of some veterans. Allegations against her style of management jelled with a report by the Geneva based consulting firm Mannet SARL.

“I rest my case,” Ms. Perelli said of Mannet, a team hired more than a decade ago to help reinvigorate the United Nations’s upper management.

There are larger forces at work here. Watching the time line of the insiders fighting against Ms. Perelli, a recurring theme seems inescapable. Every time a major electoral event was about to occur in Iraq – such as last week, when the national election was fast approaching – her troubles intensified.

Just as Ms. Perelli was leaving for Baghdad in October for the referendum vote, a messenger showed up at her apartment door, attempting to serve dismissal papers first to her husband and later to her daughter. Earlier, the initial round of allegations against Ms. Perelli began just prior to last January’s election.

Mr. Annan’s then-political department chief, Kieran Prendergast, was the initiator of the charge against her. Mr. Prendergast also was the man believed to have authored the now-infamous November 2004 letter Mr. Annan sent to Mr. Bush urging him to refrain from attacking terrorists in Falluja.

Regardless of its strategic merits in Iraq, that letter – immediately leaked to the press – smelled of blatant interference in America’s presidential election, in which the Falluja issue was front and center. It was the best illustration of how the Annan administration bet everything on Mr. Bush’s opponent, Senator Kerry, and lost.

Similar electoral bets against British and Australian leaders were made by U.N. types hoping for victory by opponents of the Iraq war. Figures in Mr. Annan’s inner circle thought they could meddle in world politics by delivering elections for the people they believed were on the right side of history. In the process, they lost any real interest in Iraq, where Ms. Perelli was active.

“The problem over there is the sin of hubris,” Ms. Perelli said, pointing to the U.N. building that she once called home and now can only look at from her apartment window. “It’s the hubris of the righteous.”